[01] Dickson Chan Sheng Siang, Faculty of Medicine, Melaka Manipal Medical College (Manipal Academy of Higher Education), Melaka, Malaysia. [02] Tharshini Solai Rajan, Faculty of Medicine, Melaka Manipal Medical College (Manipal Academy of Higher Education), Melaka, Malaysia. [03] Dhivya Elango, Faculty of Medicine, Melaka Manipal Medical College (Manipal Academy of Higher Education), Melaka, Malaysia. [04] Abd Rauf Fahmi Bin Mamat @ Muhammad, Faculty of Medicine, Melaka Manipal Medical College (Manipal Academy of Higher Education), Melaka, Malaysia.

Taste is a term that signifies the most precious information about the environment and it is stupefying that sweetness is the most universally accepted. Sweet craving portrays the desire towards consumption of food rich in sugar. This study explores the effect of anxiety disorders and emotional eating on sweet craving among medical students. There were 155 medical students from Melaka Manipal Medical College (MMMC) were recruited into this study. Hence, DASS-42 which is Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scoring was used in this study to measure the association between depression among medical students and sweet cravings. Moreover, TFEQ-18 Revised which is the Three Factor Eating Questionnaire-18 was used to measure the association between emotional eating and sweet cravings based on emotional eating, cognitive restraint and uncontrolled eating among medical students where an additional question was attached regarding their preference towards sweet craving. The results showed that females has significantly higher sweet cravings among medical students compared to males (p=0.002). Based on ethnicity, Indians showed significantly higher sweet cravings (p=<0.001) than Chinese. It was also shown that those whom are normal and obese showed higher sweet cravings compared to others among medical students. Based on depression, it was found that there is no significant association between depression and sweet craving. Furthermore, those with anxiety showed significantly higher sweet craving compared to those without anxiety (P=0.002). Those with stress showed significantly higher sweet craving compared to those without stress (p=0.001). However, there were no association between total emotional eating (TEE), total cognitive restraint (TCR), total uncontrolled eating (TUE) and sweet craving among the students.

Sweet Craving, Anxiety, Emotional Eating, Medical Students

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